1. Outside of country music, Red Lane's songs have been recorded by a diverse group of artists including Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Solomon Burke.
22 Facts About Red Lane
1. 2.
Red Lane has credits as composer or instrumentalist on at least 386 albums.
3.
Red Lane was born in Zona, Louisiana which was later incorporated into the town of Bogalusa, along the Pearl River which forms the lower part of the boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi.
4.
Red Lane's father was a sharecropper and heavy equipment operator.
5.
Red Lane began playing guitar about age nine, taught by his father.
6.
Red Lane then joined the Air Force and was stationed in Hawaii as an aircraft mechanic.
7.
Red Lane's guitar playing served him well in the Air Force, where he won a talent contest and performed on a popular live radio show called Hawaii Calls broadcast from Waikiki Beach.
8.
Red Lane began using the name "Red Lane" at this time to avoid problems with his superiors at the Air Force base, and the name stuck.
9.
Red Lane became acquainted with Justin Tubb, son of country star Ernest Tubb, who hired Lane to play in his band and arranged getting some of Lane's songs to Nashville's Buddy Killen, of Tree International Publishing.
10.
Killen facilitated Red Lane's move to Nashville and signed him as a staff writer in April 1964.
11.
Just over a week after moving to Nashville, Lane appeared on the Grand Ole Opry with Tubb.
12.
Red Lane was offered a recording contract by Chet Atkins and had a No 32 country hit with "The World Needs a Melody" which was released on RCA in the 1970s.
13.
Red Lane appeared on ABC's The Johnny Cash Show and had some other successes, but decided that he preferred a songwriter's lifestyle rather than that of a performer.
14.
Red Lane's music has been recorded by many non-country artists including Elvis Costello, Ray Charles, Engelbert Humperdinck, Solomon Burke and Bob Dylan.
15.
Red Lane developed a productive association with West, who recorded dozens of his songs.
16.
Red Lane was a guitarist for Merle Haggard and The Strangers, who recorded about 25 of Lane's songs.
17.
Red Lane had been interested in airplanes since his early career as an aircraft mechanic.
18.
Red Lane eventually got his pilot's license, and became a skydiver.
19.
Red Lane used this experience in a song "The Day I Jumped from Uncle Harvey's Plane" recorded by Roger Miller.
20.
Red Lane found a 1958 DC-8 passenger jetliner at the Smyrna, Tennessee airport, one of the few places where this particular type of plane could be repaired.
21.
Red Lane purchased the plane and had it cut into five pieces, which were shipped on flat bed trucks to his home in Ashland City, Tennessee.
22.
Red Lane once took the boys out for a boat ride on Nashville's Old Hickory Lake and surprised them by pulling the boat up to Johnny Cash's house.